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Instinct only gets you so far in the restaurant business, no matter how many years of experience you have. As of now, I’ve opened five cafes in Knoxville, Tennessee – City County Cafe, Order Up Cafe, Riverview Market, Stand Out for Good Cafe and Tombras Cafe. I’ve spent years working in the industry, and I’m still learning to go beyond my gut feeling. As a small business owner, I wear every hat, which means I don’t have the luxury of analytics teams helping me make sense of what’s working and what isn’t.
In 2013, when I began operating my first cafe, I could track what was selling, what wasn’t selling, and where the business was losing money. Now that I manage five cafes, a self-checkout market and office catering services, it’s a different story. The more my business has grown over the past decade, the harder it is to comb through the data and understand where I need to level up. I’ve been operating mostly off of instinct, focusing on putting out fires instead of prioritizing long-term growth.
I’ve been able to validate my hunches with data now that I have Square AI. I can immediately gut check my hypotheses and make confident decisions, while spending more time on the parts of my business that I really enjoy.
Putting people and experiences first has always been my business’ foundation and core philosophy. I believe if you focus on the people that success will follow. I feel a deep sense of pride when I’m able to offer delicious meals in an environment that’s both educational and fun for my staff. I want to – and do – offer places where people can come to truly relax, gather and connect. But focusing on people gets harder when your day is spent rapidly switching between urgent decisions across multiple locations, and sifting through data that takes a lot of time and energy to analyze.
Square AI is a goldmine because it gives me quick insights and answers based on my actual sales data across my locations. Now I’m able to focus on two areas of my business where efficiency matters most: menu optimization and labor management.
Here’s what I’ve learned.
Lesson #1: Fix operational inefficiencies before you scale
Everything changes when you shift from one location to several, and with five locations under my belt, I quickly realized I was no longer managing one team, one menu, and one set of peak hours. Each location has its own unique patterns, challenges and customers, and as operations grew, connecting all of the data became something I knew was important, but kept getting pushed to the back burner while I handled immediate decisions in front of me.
Square was essential when it came to expanding. We relied on the Square ecosystem for team management and our website. I felt really good about how much Square helps me scale efficiently, so I joined the Square Champions program – where business owners beta test new tools, share feedback, and connect with a community of like-minded leaders – in 2020. Through that involvement, I’ve been able to help shape Square AI from the ground up, making sure it actually meets the needs of business owners like me. It’s been incredibly rewarding to watch it evolve, and I’m thrilled that it continues to help me make smart decisions.
Lesson #2: Cutting the wrong menu item can cost you
Working on the menu is an ongoing project. Refining it, making it perfect, feeling proud about what you’re putting out, it isn’t easy. You’re constantly tinkering with the foundation of your restaurant and asking yourself what you should trim and what you should keep.
Before I started using Square AI, decisions were mostly based on my instinct and best guesses. I didn’t have the time and energy to pull the sales data from every menu item and focus on other variables like seasonality, the time of the day, or even the weather.
My intuition told me that burgers and chicken entrees were outperforming wraps, which made me feel like reducing tortilla-based items was a good move. But with Square AI, I was able to compare sales volume by lunch category and quickly learned that wrap and quesadilla sales were actually almost completely on par with burgers and chicken.
When I dug a bit deeper, I found that the patty melt, a menu item that required a unique preparation process and used an ingredient – thousand island dressing – that wasn’t found anywhere else on the menu, had actually dipped in popularity. Based on that quick process, I was able to avoid cutting a menu item that was actually a big hit and instead turned the patty melt into a seasonal specialty.
You don’t get unlimited chances to earn how a customer feels about you, and Square AI helps me make those count.
Lesson #3: Small changes add up quickly – and that’s a good thing
Labor is a massive cost for any restaurant owner and operator, and Square AI has helped me combine data to quickly make informed staffing decisions. I can ask for sales data by hour of the day and day of the week at each of my five locations, which makes me feel like I have superpowers. With this information, I was actually able to push back one of my store’s openings by 30 minutes, which sounds like a small change, but made a big difference, saving hours of labor without any impact on service.
Square AI also helped me spot rising labor and overtime costs and reverse them. After asking for my labor and overtime costs as a percentage of sales over the past year, I noticed a trend that bothered me. Since then, I’ve made a conscious effort with scheduling and have been able to reduce that labor cost percentage by 10 points.
As you scale your business, it’s important that your tech grows with you. Some of the tools that worked for you when you only had one location might not necessarily work for you once you expand to several locations. With Square AI, I have the clarity, confidence and information to make business decisions I feel good about. And now I get to spend less time in the weeds and more time diving into aspects of my business that I actually love.
